Eva-Maria Lucas
Memorial services were held in Dhahran this morning for Eva-Maria Lucas, who died here unexpectedly on Monday, July 29. Mrs. Lucas, who resided in Dhahran for the past year, is survived by her husband, Charles, and her father, Gustav Walter, now living in Giessen, West Germany.
Eva-Maria, as most of her friends knew her, was born in 1924 in the town of Insterburg, in what was then Germany, but is now Russia, and spent her childhood and youth in that country. In 1954 she emigrated to the United States, where she worked in Atlanta, Ga., for two years prior to meeting her husband Charles, during a vacation in Vienna, Austria.
In 1957 the Lucases were married and in 1959 Eva-Maria arrived with her husband in Saudi Arabia, where she soon involved herself in many community activities, including the Ras Tanura Women's Group, an organization in which she took an active role during the 14 years the Lucases lived in the seaside community.
Gardening, cooking, sailing, golfing, art, writing, and party-giving were also included among Eva-Maria's many interests. She loved flowers, particularly orchids, which the Lucases raised in their home, and she enjoyed helping to organize the Garden Group's flower shows, for many years a prominent feature of Ras Tanura life. Friends describe Eva-Maria as a gourmet cook, interested enough in the art to prepare not only many memorable dinner parties, but the first Ras Tanura Women's Group cook book, Refined Cooking, in 1966. She loved to dabble in oils, and one friend described her as "an excellent amateur painter." She was a better-than-average golfer, an enthusiastic sailor, and she enjoyed writing travel articles, many of which appeared in the Sun and Flare and The Arabian Sun.
Eva Maria's principal interest, however, was travel. As a private tourist, usually in the company of her husband, she toured most of the countries of North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia. She also loved to arrange group tours, often taking the RTWG and the DWG on tours of the area; and in later years making tours under the auspices of the Jet Set, to Abha; to Austria, where she took several ski tours; and to East Africa, an area of which she was especially fond. At the time of her death she was making arrangements for just such a tour in December, and was also working on a projected tour to Bali. [Photograph]